European fears of spillover from the Syrian war were amplified on Sunday when it emerged that a Frenchman arrested in connection with a deadly attack at a Jewish museum in Brussels last week spent much of last year with jihadist fighters in Syria.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, was arrested in Marseille in connection with the killing of two Israeli tourists and a French volunteer at the museum nine days ago. Prosecutors said that among his possessions were weapons identical to those used in the Brussels attack, as well as a 40-second video confession.

The guns were wrapped in a white sheet scrawled with the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an extremist group fighting in Syria, the Paris prosecutor François Molins said. He said the suspect had spent about a year in Syria.

At a news conference in Brussels, the Belgian state prosecutor Frédéric van Leeuw said the voice in the film admitted to the attack "against Jews and [threatened to] set Belgium on fire". The speaker, believed to be Nemmouche, who is not seen on camera, said he tried to record the actual shooting, but that the camera did not work.

The officials said Nemmouche, who is from Roubaix, in northern France, travelled to Syria last year to join jihadist fighters after becoming radicalised in prison.

Two Israeli tourists were shot at point-blank range at the Jewish museum. The gunman, who was wearing a cap and sunglasses in the attack, which was filmed by the museum's surveillance cameras, also killed a French volunteer and critically wounded a fourth victim before fleeing on foot.

According to Molins, Nemmouche's bag contained a Kalashnikov and a .38 calibre revolver with 57 cartridges, as well a dark cap, sunglasses, a balaclava, and a gas mask. All these items plus the clothing found in the bag matched those of the Brussels killer, he said.

Nemmouche, described as a drifter by officials, spent five years in jail in France on robbery charges and headed to Syria – via the UK, Lebanon and Turkey – in December 2012, three weeks after being released from prison in Lille.

On leaving Syria, he covered his tracks by flying to Malaysia and Singapore before returning to Europe, Molins said. He was noticed by German authorities in March 2014, who alerted the French counter-terrorism agency. Leeuw said Nemmouche was not known to Belgian police.

The French president, François Hollande, praised the work of the French authorities, saying the "presumed killer" had been arrested "as soon as he set foot in France, which happened to be in Marseille".

Nemmouche is being held on suspicion of murder and attempted murder. He is being questioned at the headquarters of the French counter-terrorism agency outside Paris, and has remained silent, the French prosecutor said.

Police are trying to establish whether the Brussels shootings were an isolated act by a "lone wolf" or whether the suspect belonged to a radical Islamic network. Two other people were arrested on Sunday in the Belgian town of Courtrai, where Nemmouche had stayed.

Hollande, speaking during a visit to Normandy ahead of D-day commemorations next Friday, said France would show no mercy to French Islamists who travelled to Syria to take up arms against President Bashar al-Assad. "We shall fight them, fight them, fight them," he said. "The whole government is mobilised to follow jihadists and prevent them from harming, in particular when they come back to France or Europe."

According to the interior ministry, a total 285 French nationals are believed to be fighting with Islamist guerrillas in Syria – including the sister of Mohamed Merah, who was killed in a police siege after a shooting spree in which he murdered three French soldiers and four Jewish civilians in Toulouse and Montauban in March 2012. Souad Merah disappeared from France last month, after saying that she was proud of her brother.

The Belgian case bears parallels with that of Merah, which gripped France. Commentators pointed out that Merah and the suspect in the Jewish museum shootings came from similar backgrounds and had engaged in petty crime before becoming radicalised in prison.

Merah filmed his shootings – mostly carried out at point-blank range – with the same type of device allegedly used by Nemmouche, a GoPro camera. His victims included three Jewish schoolchildren.

Nemmouche's lawyer, Soulila Badaoui, said she would not characterise the suspect as someone "predestined for this type of act", although she acknowledged that it was possible he may have become a convert to radical Islam in jail. He had lost contact with his family during his spells in prison.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...m-attack-syria

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